Future Business Leaders of America

A long time ago, I read in a Singapore newspaper an article about the unofficial education that goes on behind the scenes. It is the kind of education that is learnt outside of the classroom, in the corridors of school, in the canteen, outside school gates, but always between students. Students are taught what they should be like, or what their school is, this unofficial education breeds people of a certain kind, and the clear and resultant effect of the existence of this unofficial education is the sad but true stereotypes that the general public forms in their mind of a particular institution.

But what about if this unofficial education is not just about a particular school, but what if it is about a particular group of people? What if it has permeated through all schools, and anyone who is a business student has been "unofficially educated" as to what a business person is like?

I am insinuating a lot, and this is just my perspective not as an external being, but a part of the system.

A couple of my friends know I've been b*tching about my school's Casino Night, where it was meant to raise funds for children with leukemia. Somehow in the midst of it all, while other students were winning meagre amount of chips, with small token buy-ins of between $500 to $5000 in chips, someone showed up at the final auction with over $200,000 worth of chips. Wow. That was some luck. Until I allege that this person did not win anything at all, but the close friendship of some of the organizers of the event, the student government.

Some hours later, and some really bitter bitching to the blatant cronyism to a friend yielded a story that this wasn't just an isolated case. There are other student governments who attempt to misuse school funds to provide facilities for just a privileged few of themselves at the cost of the rest of the students. Much detail is not mine to say for fear of misquoting. However, I have just learnt a valuable lesson; that people right now, college students are just as capable of corruption, insider trading, cronyism, nepotism and the whole sleazy side of business. I could easily see any of them cooking the books, fudging the numbers and being a part of a conspiracy or cartel.

Some days later, I was talking with a friend who had a lot of interviews. One thing he said to me stood out in my mind, "They like people from fraternities a lot." Woah, this was huge news to me. A typical frat boy is nothing more than a crutch. I have not met someone in a fraternity whom I said to myself, "That is a smart person." That's basically what I have to say about fraternities, and I have friends in fraternities. Imagine whatever stereotype you have about a frat, and yes, that's probably true. So this was really big news to me. Why would any sane employer want a frat boy?

My friend told me that in a fraternity, they are taught bonds of brotherhood. In crude terms, if their boss said, "Hey, be a buddy and overlook this for me, will you?" or "It's a nine, not a four. A nine. Yeah, nine. Here, have a twenty." or "Could you kindly misplace this huge bill we have from the accounting department?", they would remember their bonds of brotherhood, through thick and thin, and the frat sticks together and easily be compatriot, and easily accessory to white collar crimes. These people already know how to do favors for others, and they are of flexible morals. Just try being in a frat, and the first thing they drill into you is that the brother (senior member of a frat) is always right.

Welcome to America.

Okay, to speak completely for the other side, employers are looking for candidates with personality. They want smart people with a life outside of work. They like to work with interesting people.

Somehow, I just don't buy that bullsh*t. Try and tell me that people in my school are smart and I'd laugh at your face. Intelligence is still a rare thing to this day. Serious intelligence, beyond the booksmarts. There are smart people, but I see people who are mostly hired are... well... questionable.

Last week, Princeton and Harvard did away with the whole early acceptance thing. It seems that early decision has a bias towards a certain groups of privilege students. Disadvantaged, or (gasp! political incorrectness) poor students simply need to compare whatever financial aid each school has to offer before accepting, and early decision simply destroys that opportunity. I thought, hey, yeah it's about time. My roommate is one such victim of the early decision practices of my college. Forced to accept a poorer financial package and in a college that wasn't his top choice, he was threatened to have his acceptance to the other college revoked if he did not attend my college. That is the problem with early decision.

But if that was a problem, colleges have a deeper problem; one to do with legacy candidates. While top Ivy Leagues in America have acceptance rates of 10% to 12%, these very same colleges accept "legacy candidates" at the rate of between 30% to 40%. That would mean that if your parents went to an Ivy League school, you are about 3 to 4 times more likely to be accepted than if you were just another candidate. This very same practices are the ones that let people like George W. Bush be a C+ student at Yale, while I strongly doubt that he'd amount to anything past a high school degree if he were in my position. It's just as disgusting, because something I don't see being hereditary is intelligence. Okay, maybe not to a large degree, but I find this practice hard to agree with, when I face the question, "Have your parents or any of your relatives attended NYU before? If so, please list."

However that isn't the end of it all; there are such a thing as faculty brats. Meaning, children of faculty has an even higher chance of being accepted into a college where their parents teach. With acceptance rates as high as 80% to 90%, I question, how qualified are these people? I mean, sure, they have smart parents who might have planned their whole lives to attend whichever college their parents teach at, but I liken this whole situation to a father giving his son a job as vice-president of his company upon graduation.

I just looked on news.google.com and I found an interesting article. Hey, even if this kind of sh*t happens to Harvard, imagine the rest of the business schools in America. I don't believe that an ethics class is in any way helpful at all, I have a friend who attempts to miss ethics class whenever possible.

So if you're worndering how it is possible that scandals from Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Arthur Anderson, Halliburton, Kmart, Mirant, Peregrine Systems, AOL Time Warner, Qwest Communications International, Merck, Exxon, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Parmalat, Royal Dutch Shell, Refco, Goldman Sachs, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynergy, General Electric, JP Morgan Chase, Sunbeam, Xerox and many more happening each year that even Forbes stopped counting after 2002, then wonder where have they gone wrong, I suggest the answer: they've learnt it all in college. And these colleges will continue to present you with tomorrow's business leaders of America.

Welcome to America.

There she was, lying in the trash. Thrown away after being used and abused. Discarded like an empty wrapper, she was fine, yet she was simply... trash.

Seeds of Thought

Sometimes you begin on a blog, and suddenly you don't like where it's going. Then you press delete, don't look back and click the red X in the top right hand (or left hand corner if you are a noob Apple user) and it's all gone, whatever you've written, whatever is there, on your mind that you were just pouring out, gone, gone, gone.

Maybe it is the numerous distractions in my life that culmulate to a mind-pounding, pneumatic-drill-in-my-head-type migraine. The symptom is this vice-like grip in my mind, and I'd like to diagnose it as something cool like brain tumor, but I think it's nothing more than just feeling under the weather, plus a little of some bacterium that got into my head. It's not the alcohol! It's not the alcohol! I got it after going to the gym on Tuesday. I attributed it to low blood sugar then, but it still hurts till now, and it's annoying.

Sometimes I wish I could open my head and stick a ladle in it and give it a good swirl. Now that's really churning my noodle... It seems agonizing to me, to be a creature of logic. Why must my every action be dictated by reason and not passion? Okay, maybe a better more poetic cry would be, "Why do I think with my head and not with my heart?" I wish I knew some Latin here and can spout something sounding intelligent and fluent in the Romantic languages, but that's just pulling crap out of my ass. But I was discussing this with someone, and I sort of asked myself the question: what's it like to fall in love at first sight?

The logic in me claims that such feelings are deeply superficial like a certain iMMokid who sits and broods in his room all day. It isn't love, it's a sort of attraction, it's a dreamers fantasy, it's purely lust and fetish. It's nothing more than carnal desire, stuff that I quickly attribute to decadence, sin and corruption. The physical body is beautiful, that I agree, but to lust after it, to desire it sexually and to possess it is... feels... somehow disagreeable.

I don't know much about love. And I guess that perhaps it isn't all that wrong just to fall in love with somone because of how they look. I mean, how different is that from falling in love with someone because of her personality? Or her humor? Or her awesomely long and shapely legs? It's all parts of the same person, all about a person. It's like some people who shun such superficiality of mere physical beauty like to claim stuff like, "I find her mind sexy." and that "Beauty does not last, but character is forever."

No, nothing is forever. The same abstract attributes that we claim to love and last forever also changes. People change, characters change, often faster and undetectable than a skin wrinkles. People go through life, and life changes people, so how is loving a woman for her mind different from loving a woman for her body? Does it make you more sophisticated? More mature? More admirable? More egotistical for claiming such levels of sophistry that is unfounded among the crass common man?

Then I guess, we hold such double standards, that loving a woman for her body is simply lust, and loving a woman for her mind is true love, when both are in fact loving the same woman. I don't exactly know what I'm saying, but I think that loving a woman for whatever reason is... well... yeah, love doesn't need a reason.

But if we can accept that people can love for physical reasons, then I suppose we can augment our current perceptions of love to allow and for it to be socially acceptable that people can love because of money. I think that it's ridiculous people think that looks and money are not good reasons for love. The most cited reason would be because these things don't last long. But what does last long? Techincally bones last a long time, especially when properly fossilised... think about it... so should it be acceptable that I love you because of your awesome bone structure? Can I fall in love with the skeleton in the biology lab because it just looks like you? After all, bones are on the inside, and everyone tells me, "It is the inside that counts."

No I'm sorry, I don't find bones sexy at all. I don't do necrophilia either. I'm just somewhat annoyed with all references to "putting the p*ssy on a pedestal" and setting double standards for things that should be and should not be. After all, why am I going to business school? It's to find a good job that pays a lot. Why do I need money? To buy stuff. To provide stuff. So how different is making a lot of money from going to the gym, or learning the Romance languages or learning how to play the guitar or going for sensitivity classes. It's all for one single thing... to make ourselves more attractive to the opposite sex. I'm sorry I put it as crudely as that, but this migraine isn't helping my crankiness one bit.

But some guy just (as in 10 minutes ago) told me that a chick confessed her love for him. Good for him. He worked hard for the past 2.5 months and at an impressive 150 pounds from I think about 170? This reminds me of something I overheard; "I'm 175 pounds of pure muscle... too bad I weigh 250 pounds." But back to my friend. The chick said that she fell for him when she first saw him. Wow, love at first sight. Just what I was mulling about.

The other night I was sitting at a bar, and we were basically rating people we know. Because the fives marry fives and sixes marry sixes... and if you weren't a match, it'll end up in divorce. Or worse. So now, take a moment and start rating ten of your closest friends, 10 being the "YES, I WOULD DIE TO BE WITH HER"-hot Keira Knightley type and 1 being the extreme version of Jack Black. Extreme here meaning, a bigger beer belly, a more obnoxious personality, more lame jokes, more crappy movies, and a lot less money and lives in a trailer park. Jack Black already burps and farts and smells anyway. You catch my drift. And after rating ten people, where do you sit on the list? And note, do you see yourself going out with people with a completely different rating from you? Or those closely similar to yours? Then do you catch my drift?

Speaking of drifting, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift sucks. Even my grandmother could drift like that.

Anyway, I'm really bored right now, so I'm intermittently typing this while messing with my holy handgrenade of rubberbands, and I made it deadlier by attaching not just a laser to it, but a PINK laser POINTER! Awesome, behold! The destructive power of office supplies! I just took a picture with my new camera/phone and will upload the picture soon.

But I guess my problem is that I don't find any passion in life. I don't love doing anything, period. Lack of a sense of enjoyment. Many people would probably tell me that life's not fun and perhaps I can blame them for sucking all the fun out of life. Maybe I need a Near-Death-Experience to somehow convince myself that life is worth living.

By the way, a good analogy for being in reach of something but unable to grab it is: it's like having an itch in your neck, but you're a quadplegic.

I should update my blog more, but sometimes there's nothing to write. But when I do write, I do hope that I have written something thought provoking or at least interesting. I wonder how many people do follow my blog. But I am so annoyed by bloggers who think that since they are famous they can trashtalk and abuse their readers with atrocious language. It's immoral. But not as disturbing as this. I've noticed a couple of bloggers who sort of put up their blogs as a personal worship place and slam a lot of "glamour shots" of themselves in the readers face, with one or two lines that go, "OMG DUN I LOOK SO KEWTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!"

Yeah, I just revolted myself by doing that... I need to go scrub myself off in a hot shower. Out.